1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to a water-cooled LED lighting system and, more particularly, the invention relates to a water-cooled LED lighting system for indoor farming providing continuously circulating water through the LEDs thereby delivering high intensity light while reducing or eliminating heat loads in the growing environment and lowering operational expenses typically attributed to expensive, energy-draining HVAC systems.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Indoor grow lights have traditionally used incandescent or fluorescent light sources. Recently, grow lights have been introduced which use light emitting diodes (LEDs) light sources. LEDs are new a lighting technology in the grow light industry. LEDs emit light at specific wavelength bands depending upon the type of diode. Because of this narrow wavelength band a white LED is actually comprised of a mix of different color LEDs to create the white light. The intensity of an LED may be controlled as well allowing the LEDs to be dimmed.
Like any other industry, the agricultural industry seeks to increase production and lower operating costs of its products. Generally, plants exposed to more blue light tend to grow stouter and with broader leads. Plants exposed to more red light tend to grow faster and taller but with thinner stems and smaller leaves.
LED technology has made significant gains in recent years. The efficiency and light output of LED's has increased exponentially since the 1960's, with a doubling occurring about every 36 months. As a result, LED technology can now be successfully deployed for grow light applications, to provide high-efficiency, low cost, safe and long-lasting grow light solutions. However, the performance of LED grow lights varies, and there is an ongoing need in the grow light industry for high-performance grow lights that maximize photosynthesis, plant growth and flowering.
Basically, the field of light emitting diodes (LED) is a rapidly advancing technology that has the promise to significantly reduce power consumption for general lighting as well as for indoor horticulture. Over the last five years, ever brighter and more efficient LED emitters in the 3-5 W range have been developed which is a significant improvement over the LEDs of 10 years ago that did not exceed 50 mW. When used for indoor growing, LED based lights have the advantage of being higher efficiency than other lights. In addition, LEDs can be focused on the photo-synthetically active regions of the light spectrum, namely blue and red (400-500 nm and 600-700 nm respectively) without wasting energy on the green (500-600 nm) region which is not very useful to plants during the vegetative phase.